The Philadelphia Phillies began the process of surveying the trade market for Cole Hamels back in October when it was announced that they planned to rebuild.

They compiled a list of teams they felt were good matches for a trade and scouted those organizations thoroughly from Spring Training through last week.

"This was as well prepared as we've been," Ruben Amaro said. "There were no shortage of suitors, and when you're talking about five or six teams to cover all those players and all those prospects … we started to target some of those guys during the offseason. The scouting and the addition of the analytics portion of these evaluations put us in the best position to be ready to make the trades."